As part of the annual evaluation of Title I Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) projects, this report was produced. It is organized into six sections: (1) Programmatic Goals; (2) Evaluation Techniques; (3) Findings; (4) Discussion; (5) Summary and Conclusions; and (6) Abstracts of Project Reports. The abstracts are based on annual…

The limitations and advantages of any given measure of performance used to classify students as good or poor readers have not been investigated thoroughly. A study was conducted to determine what happens on several dependent measures of comprehension when the same students are separated into good and poor readers based on different criteria.…

This interim report summarizes the procedures and results of the Sustaining Effects Study (SES) on Compensatory Education, conducted at selected elementary schools during the 1967-77 school year. Data from the study are presented for the following findings: (1) poor and educationally needy children are the principal recipients of Compensatory…

This report offers the premise that a psychology of reading instruction has a set of questions of its own, questions that concern the ways in which the environmental interventions called instruction interact with cognitive processes to modify competence. The report discusses two streams of psychological research as they relate to reading…

A computer managed instructional system for reading, begun five years ago in Belvedere-Parkway Elementary School in Calgary, contains 329 behavioral objectives ranging from kindergarten to 8th grade levels, with testing performed online. After completion of a test, a student receives a printout listing the objectives completed, those that need…

This eight-year follow-up study, examining the educational impact of a compensatory early childhood program upon disadvantaged students, compares mean scores of the treatment group of 410 former preschool and all day kindergarten students with those of a comparison group of 141 traditional half day kindergarten students. Empirical evidence shows…

The study of the same people at several occasions is known by various names: panel studies, multi-wave, multi-variable models, cohort analysis, and gain score analysis. The use of econometric concepts, path analysis, and structural equation analysis to study multi-wave, multi-variable models became widespread in methodological practice in the late…

To ascertain the relevancy of behavioral psychology to those who are engaged in developmental work with college and adult students, this paper reviews articles found in several journals concerned with that discipline. The articles reviewed were chosen as representative of those pertaining to achieving academic success and are organized into five…

A finding in the 1975-76 evaluation of several California programs designed to improve the academic achievement of young children indicated that in schools whose students scored at or below the twentieth percentile on the Entry Level Test in 1973-74, third grade reading test scores had declined relative to their predicted scores over the…

To examine the relationship between reading performance and television viewing, the state of Connecticut's third assessment of educational progress in reading included questions relating to the reading materials available in students' homes, their television viewing habits, and their attitudes toward reading. Approximately 8,000 students in grades…

A year-long holistic study of literary responses was conducted to determine the effects of using a transactive literary paradigm in secondary school English classrooms. (The transactive--for transactional--paradigm emphasizes the reader's involvement with a text and the reader's use of personal experiences to extract meaning from texts.)…

This summary report describes the three-year Special Emphasis Project, a large federal program directed at preventing and correcting reading difficulties among elementary school children. Section one of the report provides a brief history of the project, with descriptions of its rationale, intent, major and specific provisions, and the controlled…

This is a comparative study of the cognitive, reading, and achievement levels of Italian Americans in bilingual programs and of their monolingual Italian and American peers. Three groups of students age 10 to 13 were matched within and across groups, according to schools, grade level, dialect, and socioeconomic status. Group I was subdivided into…

This study investigated factors associated with top and bottom achievement groups for students enrolled in the Intermediate Science Curriculum Study (ISCS) program. Differences between achievement groups within Levels I, II and III of ISCS were also investigated. A cross-sectional sample of Level I (n=372), Level II (n=290) and Level III (n=379)…

A new method of analysis was used in the Michigan Educational Assessment Program to test minimum competencies in fourth grade reading achievement. This technique permitted a substantial decrease in testing time and costs. The original test consisted of 95 items measuring 19 objectives; mastery was indicated by correct responses to four out of the…